Re: Light laffs

Re: Light laffs

I think Cathy is being too cleaver by one-half. Women can have children with multiple men. So I would also be genuinely curious as the cause of a 9 percentage point discrepancy. Is it all age? Are women less likely to have children with different fathers than men having children with multiple mothers?

Re: Light laffs

Posted: 08 Nov 2017, 22:49

by the innominate one

Those are all potentially interesting questions. But is there any other possible answer to the question of why a greater fraction of women are mothers than men are fathers than Cathy's? The only other possible explanation I can think of is differential mortality between the sexes.

Re: Light laffs

Posted: 08 Nov 2017, 23:03

by thoreau

The variance in offspring production is going to be lower for the sex that can only produce offspring at a rate of roughly once per year and higher for the sex that could, at least in principle, impregnate multiple mates per day.

Re: Light laffs

Those are all potentially interesting questions. But is there any other possible answer to the question of why a greater fraction of women are mothers than men are fathers than Cathy's? The only other possible explanation I can think of is differential mortality between the sexes.

I can think of 4 off the top of my head.
Men are older on average when they have kids (the age cutoff for the survey is 40).
Men do not know with 100% certainty that they are fathers, while women do know with 100% certainty.
Artificial insemination.
Men are more likely to lie in these survey.

Re: Light laffs

The variance in offspring production is going to be lower for the sex that can only produce offspring at a rate of roughly once per year and higher for the sex that could, at least in principle, impregnate multiple mates per day.

But that would make it more likely that men are more likely to be fathers than women would be mothers.

Re: Light laffs

The variance in offspring production is going to be lower for the sex that can only produce offspring at a rate of roughly once per year and higher for the sex that could, at least in principle, impregnate multiple mates per day.

But that would make it more likely that men are more likely to be fathers than women would be mothers.

Not really. It's difficult for women to produce a large number of offspring but since the number of adult women is pretty close to the number of adult men the average number of offspring per woman and man will be about the same. The only way for women and men to have the same average while men have a larger variance is if men have a lot of outliers on both the high and low ends. Since the average is in the low single digits a lot of those outliers will have to have zero offspring.

Re: Light laffs

I think Cathy is being too cleaver by one-half. Women can have children with multiple men. So I would also be genuinely curious as the cause of a 9 percentage point discrepancy. Is it all age? Are women less likely to have children with different fathers than men having children with multiple mothers?

I'm on my phone, so linking is a pain, but I thought there were several DNA studies (Wilder 2004 is one that pops up when I Google, but I think there are more recent ones) that show the historical disparity is far, far greater than 9%.

Like, the fact that sausage looks super gross when it's being made is literally proverbial. And I understand that a bunch of people don't really realize that, but you'd think famous chefs would already know.

Like, the fact that sausage looks super gross when it's being made is literally proverbial. And I understand that a bunch of people don't really realize that, but you'd think famous chefs would already know.

I assume they do and are, quite literally, being pretentious about it for attention and ratings.

Like, the fact that sausage looks super gross when it's being made is literally proverbial. And I understand that a bunch of people don't really realize that, but you'd think famous chefs would already know.

I assume they do and are, quite literally, being pretentious about it for attention and ratings.

Probably.

When people are complaining about pink slime---it has organ meats and intestines and other gross things!---I always want to respond, "You know, the Native Americans used every part of the chicken."